by Stephen Soukup
Without Obama, Trump would never have become president, and that’s true both literally and figuratively.
Over the weekend, Barack Obama appeared at a campaign rally for Democrats in Ohio and managed to make some headlines by ridiculing President Trump’s design skills. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the former president quipped. The crowd, of course, loved it. The media did too. Republicans responded with some mockery of their own, pointing out that Obama has little room to talk about design preferences, given the architectural monstrosity that is his presidential library in Chicago. All things considered, Obama accomplished what he set out to do: he made himself the center of attention, which is the only place, apparently, that he feels comfortable.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Obama? The guy who left office ten years ago? Why is this multi-deci-millionaire running around the country trying to get socialists and socialist-adjacent candidates (including Abdul El-Sayed) elected to high office? Shouldn’t he be off enjoying his oceanfront mansion on Martha’s Vineyard or his other oceanfront mansion on Oahu? Or playing basketball on the NBA regulation-size court at the aforementioned “library”? Isn’t that what most ex-presidents are doing a decade after their terms ended, enjoying retirement?
Well… yes, but Obama hasn’t been gone ten years yet. Technically, it’s only been nine years, nine months, and six days (not that anyone’s counting). More to the point, as I say, Obama can’t stand not being the center of attention. He and Michelle just celebrated their 34th wedding anniversary, and because of his ongoing obsession with politics and being in the spotlight, they might not make it to 35. As the former president himself admitted this past spring, his political fixation “does create a genuine tension in our household, and it frustrates [Michelle].” Still, that’s what he does. That’s all he does. Because he can’t help himself. As Obama also noted last spring, “no other ex-president was the main surrogate for the party for four election cycles after they left office.” Maybe there’s a reason for that?
Nevertheless, Republicans should be grateful.
Now, when I say that, I say it as someone who has never been especially good at hiding his frustration with Obama. As I’ve noted before, I believe quite firmly that much of the toxic nature of our politics today is the result of Obama’s presidency, his governing style, and his pretense to intellectual and moral superiority over everyone he has met or will meet. As I put it in these pages just over a year ago:
[I]n 2008, with the advent of the “Hope and Change” era, Americans were given implicit permission to hate one another for their differing “values” and to see one another exclusively as friends or enemies in accordance with those values. Rather than approach his election as the enormous racial accomplishment it was, the essential redemption of the nation’s long and sordid racial history, Obama chose to scold those unlike him and to turn them into the sociological “other.” He told his supporters to “fight” their political opponents…and to “punch back twice as hard” when confronted by opponents who resisted their proclamations of moral superiority. He and his administration demanded that supporters turn family gatherings into policy debates/arguments. He mocked his adversaries mercilessly and encouraged his “team” to laugh at them and see them as “lesser than.” In short, Obama took the political and cultural degeneration of the previous two centuries and made the acknowledgement and application of that “ruin” socially acceptable, if not socially mandatory.
In other words, I wouldn’t mind a whole lot if he decided to become a beach bum and demanded that taxpayers foot the bill for his Secret Service detail to take surfing lessons, as long as it meant that he’d never set foot on a political stage again. As he demonstrated with his “Cheesecake Factory” put-down, the guy is a sanctimonious oikophobe, unrivaled in his self-promotion and detestation of the canaille even among this nation’s unusually supercilious ruling class.
But then, that’s kind of the point—and the specific reason Republicans should be grateful to him.
In this context, it’s important to remember that Barack Obama was, in many ways, Donald Trump’s creator—or at least President Donald Trump’s creator. Without Obama, Trump would never have become president, and that’s true both literally and figuratively.
Recall that on April 30, 2011, Obama gave his most famous—and costliest—speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which he mocked Trump to his face for five full minutes. He mocked Trump’s fixation on his birth certificate, mocked his leadership skills, and mocked his stint as the host of a reality show. He did so to uproarious laughter from the crowd, or at least most of it. As legend has it, that was (literally) the day Trump decided he would run for president, the day he decided to undo as much as he could of Obama’s legacy.
For Obama, that should have been a date that would live in infamy (to coin a phrase), a day the mistakes of which he would never want to repeat. And yet… As the Captain in Cool Hand Luke memorably noted, “some men you just can’t reach.”
As for the figurative part, this has two components. First, by November 2016, the electorate as a whole was tired of being hectored and chided by their leaders. Very, very tired. They were tired of being told they were racist and sexist and “deplorable.” Trump swooped in and told them he thought they were great and that he would make their country great again. It’s not clear whether the American people believed that he could make the country great again, but they wanted to believe him, and that was enough. After eight years, they wanted something different, something less disdainful of them and their dreams. They knew—by her own words—that Hillary Clinton also thought they were deplorable, and so they voted for a different type of Hope and Change.
Second, Republicans specifically were exhausted by their party’s mainstream, which spent the eight years of the Obama presidency largely giving him what he wanted or, at most, fighting back weakly and ineffectively. They saw Obama drag his Republican opponents mercilessly, and they wanted someone who would do the same for them. They despised the establishment for a host of reasons, all exacerbated by Obama. The following passage from an op-ed published in February 2016 gives just a taste of what the Republican base was looking for in 2016 and what it saw in Trump. This passage doesn’t address Obama directly, but it does show how angry the base was with the establishment and how Trump tapped into that anger:
The presidential debate that evening pitted Trump against nearly a dozen would-be nominees, with donor favorite Jeb Bush taking a prominent position on stage. Though I hadn’t chosen a candidate, I liked Bush: a conservative problem solver, a good governor, and a man of first-class intellect. I had even briefly considered working for the former Florida governor. But during an exchange about former president George W. Bush, Jeb said something that made me want to scream: “As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure: He kept us safe.”
My anger sprang, not from a difference over policy, but from somewhere more primal. I wanted, as Walt Whitman might say, to sound my “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Whatever I thought about Jeb’s education plan or record as governor, he had touched a raw cultural nerve. His defense of his brother ignored and insulted the experiences of people like me, and he was proud of it.
In an instant, I became Trump’s biggest fan. I wanted him to go for the jugular. I wanted him to inquire whom, precisely, George W. Bush had kept safe.
The author of that op-ed was, of course, JD Vance, then a principal at Mithril Capital. Vance was not a Trump fan at the time and, in fact, was a critic. Still, he saw in the future president (and his future boss) the willingness to touch previously untouchable subjects and take previously untakable positions.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that Obama begat Trump. Weirdly, Obama has never forgiven Trump for that, and so he keeps at it, trying to undo the damage he did. This is good news for Republicans—at a moment when they desperately need good news. With midterm elections looming in just over a week, President Trump’s ratings cratering, and most polls (even those that aren’t fakes) showing a building Democratic wave, perhaps the only man who can save the GOP now is Barack Obama. By reminding Republican voters why they voted for Trump in the first place and what, exactly, is at stake, Obama may be able to pull off a miracle, just not the one he’s hoping for. Obama has really never had any midterm coattails. He did help get Joe Biden elected, one supposes, but that’s probably not something about which he really should want to brag. He thinks he’s out on the campaign trail riling up the Democratic base—and he may be—but he may also be riling up the Republican base.
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/26/thanks-again-obama/
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